WHEN SHE IS TWELVE, she will ask her father how he entered the field of Wrist Studies. He will take off his glasses and place his thumb and middle finger on his nose. He will breathe in deeply and look her in the eye, then put his glasses back on. He will pull from his shelf a first edition of Wrist Discourse: Toward a Unity of Arm and Hand, flip to the opening pages, and hand her the book. When she starts to read it, he will ask if she could take it to her room, as he is very busy. She will go there and read these words:
The leading scholar in the field of Wrist Studies cites a single moment in his discovery of the field. When clasping a bracelet on his daughter, he was taken by the fact that it seemed to fall either on her hand or her arm. When he asked his daughter to point to her wrist, the daughter pointed to her head. Wrists, he then concluded, are a social construction perpetrated by our need to categorize the body. Subsequently, his life’s work became stripping the world of the wrist.